


Be Cheery, My Lads

by lonelywalker



Category: The Art of Fielding - Chad Harbach
Genre: College, Gen, POV Alternating, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-05
Updated: 2013-04-05
Packaged: 2017-12-07 14:16:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,197
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/749452
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lonelywalker/pseuds/lonelywalker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Guert, Pella, Mike and Owen's first experiences at Westish College. Be wary of some spoilers and anvils of foreshadowing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Be Cheery, My Lads

_It is not down in any map; true places never are.  
\- Moby-Dick_

I.

It was early evening by the time Guert arrived at the college gates, having trudged wearily from the town center, where the truck driver had stopped and started to unload his wares for one of the town’s few stores. Guert had unloaded himself, hauled a hefty duffel over each shoulder, and found yet another someone to ask for directions.

He’d been all right as far as Milwaukee. His dad had driven him into Madison, and from there he’d taken the bus. It had meant an early start, but he’d assumed he needed the time to bone up on his reading. The acceptance letter from Westish, although longed and hoped for, had struck him with absolute terror when it finally appeared in the family mailbox. For the first time in his life he was ashamed to be a farmboy, from a place that didn’t even really have a name, going to a historic college filled with books and kids who, even though they were all his age more or less, had undoubtedly gone to better schools. The fact that he had never read _Hamlet_ was, for some reason, weighing particularly heavily on his mind.

“You’ll do fine,” his dad had said. George, who was the only person in Guert’s family ever to attend college (and had done so eighteen years prior) had nodded and sort of shrugged. At worst he’d come back and work for his dad. At best he’d probably do the same thing.

No one had actually wanted to drive him all the way up to Westish, which was on Lake Michigan a couple of hours north of Milwaukee, just south of Door County. The farm wouldn’t tend to itself, after all, and Guert had relished the idea of freedom, just heading out one day and going further from home than he’d ever gone alone before. He’d probably be back for Christmas, if not Thanksgiving, but it was the gesture that mattered. He was going to be a college kid now. He was going to grow up.

In Milwaukee he’d asked about another bus to take him north and then patiently monitored a lengthy debate between several staff members at the bus station. Even when he pointed out Westish on the map – or, really, where Westish was, because the town itself wasn’t marked – they shook their heads and sighed. Eventually he hitched a ride from someone going in vaguely the right direction. Then he did the same thing with someone else, and someone else. It was the sort of activity his mom generally thought would get him murdered, but Guert was well over six feet tall, built like a footballer, with biceps swollen from a summer of tossing around grain sacks. No one did anything but smile.

Westish had accepted him at least partly based on his abilities at quarterback for his high school team. Those abilities presumably weren’t particularly impressive, given that no one had wanted to give him an actual scholarship, but then his high school wasn’t the kind of place scouts visited anyway. The acceptance letter had mentioned that, in lieu of direct financial aid, he’d be given some sort of job around campus – filing, or washing dishes, or picking up trash. The Affenlights certainly couldn’t have afforded to send him any other way.

By the time he found Glendinning Hall, which was where he should have been by early afternoon, they were packing up papers and switching off the lights. One of the young women, dressed like a secretary, looked up at him. “Yes?”

“I’m a new student here. Can I register?”

“Well. You’re late.”

“Oh,” said Guert, as if perhaps he should trudge home, or sleep on one of the benches in the quad overnight.

She switched the desk lamp back on. “What’s your name?”

“Guert Affenlight.” He read the list upside down and pointed himself out. Several other names were also unchecked, but probably kids from New York and Texas and China had made it here in less time. 

“Hello Guert.” She smiled and laid her hand on a thick brown envelope, top of the pile. “I’ve been looking at your name half the day. Here’s general info about the college, class schedules, meal times…”

He hadn’t really eaten all day, just sandwiches on the bus. “Meal times?” he said hopefully.

“And here’s your room key. Phumber 103. You need to go out of here to the Small Quad, that’s the other side of the library. There’s a nameplate on the wall.”

Guert looked at the key, feeling as if he should be asking more questions: what about his job? What about football? What, especially, about meals? But she’d already switched off the light again, and he felt as though it would be impolite to inquire further. Presumably he could find other kids around the place and follow them. Maybe he’d even have a roommate – the only way he’d escaped having one at home was the convenience of being eight years younger than his next-oldest brother, and therefore a generally unsuitable companion at any age.

After solving the conundrum of Phumber Hall’s multiple staircases leading to multiple, apparently unconnected, floors, he found his room – one of two on a second-floor landing. The door was locked. Inside there was one bed, a stack of sheets and a folded comforter on top of a mattress. One desk. One bookshelf. One closet. Guert dropped his bags to the floor and investigated the bathroom.

Phumber 103 wasn’t especially big, but he seemed to have it all to himself. It, and the impressive, institutional amount of hot water produced by the shower. Realizing he had no towels, he dried himself off with a t-shirt and set about arranging his possessions in his new home: books on the shelf, clothes in the closet. In ten minutes he was done, empty bags shoved under the bed. The room was suddenly very, very empty. Guert looked at the brown envelope.

Inside, he found plenty of schedules for everything he could possibly need, including a note to report for duty at the library the following evening, and a handwritten missive from Coach Gramsci to report for football practice at something called the VAC half an hour ago. Guert pulled on the t-shirt and whatever other clothes he deemed appropriate and sprinted out: he was a freshman and a farmboy and he was _late_. He’d be sitting on the bench for the rest of his life.

The stadium the Westish Sugar Maples played in was larger than the one at Guert’s old high school, which was a field bordered on one side by rickety terraced seating, but it looked as though it was neglected just as much by adoring crowds. By the time Guert got there, the other players were gathered in a horseshoe of bodies, being treated to a pep talk – or whatever the opposite of a pep talk was – by the coach.

“I want to see scalps by tomorrow night!” he was saying, which Guert initially took for some sort of Indian-related metaphor. “This is a team, and individuality and sissy hair has no place in a- who the hell are you?”

Guert had never been the most charismatic of boys, never the most at ease among strangers, but at his high school he’d been a leader among almost-men. Here he was the center of attention for a group of burly actual-men who might have had non-identical hair, but were certainly staring at him now with matching expressions of amusement.

“Affenlight,” he said.

“Affenlight!” Coach Gramsci held up his clipboard and with great gravitas ticked off a name. “Thank you for joining us finally. Now get going.”

“Sir?”

“Laps, Affenlight. Start running, and no cutting the corners.”

If this was a tryout – and the other guys were certainly doing things appropriate for one – no one asked Guert to do anything but run, which he did steadily in the humid evening air, a breeze from out east ruffling his coach-unapproved hair. Probably even running was more than he’d be required to do during the season. But when the others had trailed back to the locker room and Guert was fantasizing about his mom’s kringles as he passed the start/finish line for what seemed like the fiftieth time, Coach Gramsci slapped the clipboard against his back. “Okay, son, you’ve got heart. Back here tomorrow night, and we’ll see what you can do with a ball. Hit the showers.”

Left alone on the field, Guert considered the option of continuing to run, just to impress the absolutely no one who was now watching, as well as embracing the more tempting option of collapsing where he stood.

He peeled off his sweat-soaked shirt, mopped more sweat from his brow, and turned his face toward the breeze. Out in the distance was a single blinking light, and the grass underfoot became longer and rougher as he walked out toward it, half-stumbling over rocks in the darkness. And then his sneakers were being soaked through by the waves lapping at the shore.

Guert toed off his shoes, dropped them and his shorts and briefs back a few feet, and walked into the surf: the way people did when they were trying to kill themselves in a vaguely poetic way. The water was perfectly cool on his skin and he could wade out a long way with it only reaching his chest, and then, once he hit a sandbar, his thighs again. He stood there and looked back at the campus, at the lone light on the shore and beyond it the library and dormitories and classrooms. In the other direction there was just blackness, stars like he could see at home, and water stretching out forever.

He thought that, just perhaps, he was in love.

 

II.

“So, what do you think?”

Affenlight stepped out of the bathroom, fastidiously folding up the cuffs of his blue dress shirt while being entirely ignored by his beloved daughter, who was still draped across much of the couch in a position he couldn’t believe was actually comfortable. “Pella?”

“What?”

He’d read papers on teenage physiology and understood that their surly manner and frequent exhaustion was a result of hormonal and other physical changes during puberty… but surely staying out until the wee hours and returning home with alcohol on one’s breath didn’t actually _help_. Affenlight had tried being a strict disciplinarian, which wasn’t a natural stance for him, and he hated being stern with her. He was presently attempting to be satisfied with her at least returning home at all, as well as keeping up with her schoolwork.

“What do you think?”

Pella opened her eyes, squinting at the light, and adopted an expression of mystification. “Huh.” She frowned. “Who are you and what’ve you done with my father?”

Affenlight smiled. He’d had a beard, in some form or another, since his senior year of college. But now that he was returning there, going all the way back to Westish, the thought had occurred to him that perhaps a change was in order. “I thought maybe this was a bit more presidential.”

“Well, yeah. More Kennedy than Lincoln, anyway.” Pella sat up. “You’re a total hottie, Dad. Do we have any toast?”

As if it just sat around. “Would you like me to _make_ you some toast?”

Usually he dragged the politeness out of her, but today he made her buttered toast and scrambled eggs and orange juice just from a noncommittal grunt. She looked at it all in semi-revulsion, as if she might throw a tantrum and sweep it from the table, but then she flipped back a coppery lock of hair and stuck a fork into the mass of eggs. Protein. Good for swimming.

“I’ll be away for three days,” Affenlight said. “I’ll be on my cell, of course, and Marcia next door knows you’ll be on your own, so if you need anything…”

“I won’t need anything.”

“If you do.” He scratched at his jaw. It felt odd, tender, itchy. He’d probably given himself razor burn and now he’d break out in acne like some of the boys Pella very definitely was not dating. Well, the new look had seemed like a good idea at the time, and if it didn’t work out he just had to lay off shaving again. In any case, he’d started growing a beard in an attempt to look older – not so much twenty-five as nineteenth century – and now that he was over fifty it was well past time to start looking just a little younger.

He leaned in to hug her when the cab honked at the door, and she hugged him back with just a little more enthusiasm than usual. “Please answer your phone when I call,” he said, knowing he sounded like precisely the pathetic, uncool parent she took him for. “I don’t care if you’re at a party or a boyfriend’s… Well, I _do_ care, but I just want to know you’re okay. Especially when I’m halfway across the country.”

“Yeah, Dad, I get it.” She kissed his shaven cheek. “Have fun. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do!”

He read on the plane, boning up on editions of the Westish College alumni newsletter, which he’d unearthed from a closet shelf. Even though every newsletter of that type was duty-bound to overwhelming positivity, there was no hiding the fact that Westish was hardly in the big leagues for either academic success or fundraising. It was a good, solid, respectable school, as it had been when he had attended as a student, but it was barely anyone’s first choice. Being president of Westish was hardly an impressive position – it could be easily argued it was in fact a considerable step down from his current post as head of the Harvard English Department – and the pay wouldn’t be much better, but there were other attractions.

At the airport he rented a car, threw his bag in the back, and set off northwards along the lakeshore. It was a glorious day, clear and bright, and he wished both that Pella could have come with him and that she would have appreciated this one whit of the amount he did. But he’d been taking her to lakes and rivers and the ocean her entire life. It was just water to her. For him, possibly because he’d grown up in a sea of grass, it was freedom itself, making long-suppressed emotion well up to the extent he was almost brought to tears.

Halfway there, he pulled off the road and sat up on the trunk by the water, smoking a cigarette. He thought about calling Pella, who just a few years ago would have been with him and would have at least _tried_ to understand what he was feeling. When she was little she’d eagerly paged through photos from his time at Westish, viewing the little rural college like a mystical land that, like Narnia and Middle Earth, was located on no map but was merely “west-ish” from Cambridge. But now she was probably at school or the pool, and there was no point in crying wolf.

The spring semester had just begun at Westish, and he dutifully got a Visitor parking sticker and parked in the appointed spot. The parking, at least, was new since his last visit, and it left him disoriented. Still, the lake was in the same place. As he strolled past students, all of them looking more or less like the Harvard kids did, and gazed in wonder at the mirrored library, hearing the chapel bells with a hint of nostalgia, he found himself in the Small Quad, staring up at the back of Herman Melville.

“You look lost,” said a voice by his arm.

He turned to find a very slight woman standing there in the type of elegant, colorful clothes that seemed almost anathema to the Midwest. She might have been around his age, and for a moment he found himself wondering if they’d known each other when he was a student… but of course there was no reason for that. “No… Well, yes, a little.” Affenlight smiled. “Things have changed since I was here last.”

“Ah yes, Herman.” The woman nodded. “Our little college branding scheme. You must be older than you look.”

“Excuse me?”

“He’s been here for thirty years.”

“Oh, yes.” Affenlight stuck out a hand. “Guert Affenlight, class of ‘71.”

She regarded his hand with an enigmatic smile, and finally shook it. “Judy Eglantine. I knew I recognized you. I have your book.”

“You teach here?” Affenlight wondered if he should recognize her name too.

“English. Oral history. Is there a reunion going on? Usually they do those sorts of things in the summer.”

“No… I mean, not that I know of. I’m actually here for an interview.” Which was probably hush-hush, but there were a limited number of reasons a Harvard professor would be hanging around Westish, and he couldn’t very well pretend to be giving a lecture in her own department. “I was looking for Scull Hall?”

Judy pointed in a flourish of lavender fabric. “Right there, next to Herman.”

And beyond Herman, the lake. Suddenly his perspective shifted, his memories finally clicking with the modern day reality. “Phumber Hall,” he said with an air of wonder. He half wanted to run upstairs and disturb whichever poor kid was living there now. Never mind that: he wanted to delve through the library again, lose himself in the stacks…

“Thanks,” he said to Judy, and was about to tear off like the eager farmboy he’d once been, when the man he was now stopped him. “Maybe once I’m done with Bruce Gibbs you could show me around? If you’re not too busy?”

His meeting took almost three hours as Gibbs outlined the responsibilities of the position and then spent a good deal of time quizzing Affenlight about every aspect of his professional experience and personal background – “Not my concern, I know,” he assured Affenlight, “but the trustees are very particular.” Gibbs seemed to view it as especially aggravating that Affenlight had no wife who might be volunteered to take charge of social events, but Pella’s existence cheered him a little. Possibly the revelation of her mother’s death pleased him more than it should.

Affenlight wandered out to the lake afterward and phoned Pella. She picked up on the fifth ring and they exchanged banalities. Then he called Judy. She took him to dinner at a slightly dowdy French place, where half the English department seemed to be hanging out for the evening, and then he took her back to his hotel room. Some would have viewed banging the faculty as poor conduct, but Westish was so isolated that he doubted anyone would mind. It was probably even encouraged. Whatever else were they going to do? Sleep with the students?

 

III.

“This sucks.”

“Pella…”

Pella flopped down on the love seat in her dad’s office. Even that sucked – it was one of those hard, squeaky, leather affairs, designed to keep anyone from getting too comfortable. The chairs upstairs in his study were pretty much the same too. Everything in this entire college seemed to be designed for the express purpose of, well, _studying_. Pella did not approve.

“There’s _nothing_ to do here.” She wasn’t just some irritating kid with a two-second attention span. She had facts to back it up. “There are no stores. Nowhere good to eat. No movie theater. No nothing.”

Her dad sighed. He’d been fun once, she was sure of it. At least, he’d done his best to keep her occupied. Now it was like he was becoming an actual, ancient part of this place with its nineteenth-century buildings and 1920s bookcases. He wouldn’t even admit how boring it was. “There’s an entire library,” he pointed out. “And the pool.”

“Reading and swimming? Dad, I do those the entire year.”

“Well you can do them here too.” He scratched at the last page of something with his fountain pen. The hallowed presidential signature. “Pella, I’m not sure what you expect me to do.”

She spread her hands. “We could go to Milwaukee. Green Bay isn’t that far either, is it?”

“We can go on the weekend. I have to work.”

“So I’ll take the bus.”

“I don’t want you wandering around strange cities by yourself.”

“ _Dad_.” They’d had these arguments before, the ones where she pointed out she was fifteen, almost a real adult, and had practically grown up in Boston, which wasn’t some tiny rural pretend-city like Westish, WI. Not to mention she’d regularly snuck off to NYC, Providence, and other places, often without him even knowing. And here she was, still in one piece, still a straight-A student, not pregnant or a drug addict… Okay, she had one tattoo, but only one, and then so did he. Plus he probably smoked and drank more than she did. He said he’d quit the cigarettes, but she’d still found a half-packet in the bureau upstairs.

She got to her feet. “When are you going to be finished?”

Her dad surveyed the papers in front of him. “Say five, half past five? I’ll call you.”

As she left, tugging open that heavy walnut office door, he didn’t ask where she was going. Ah, she thought, the benefits of experience.

Even at fifteen, she didn’t stick out among the college kids. She was tall for her age (blame her dad’s genes) and well-developed in certain other areas (blame her mom’s), and very much used to hanging out with older kids and passing for at least eighteen, if not twenty-one. Unfortunately, Westish didn’t seem to offer very many opportunities to misbehave. The student union, for which she didn’t have a pass but snuck in on the basis of her dad’s name, was just a lot of kids studying or watching TV. Another room boasted overly-competitive ping-pong. She gave it a pass.

It was too early for the bars to be open, but she walked into town and past Bartleby’s anyway, just to see for future reference. Compared to the bars she was used to, it looked small and quaint, and probably wouldn’t feature much talent in terms of male patrons either. All the boys here looked like such _kids_ , even compared to the guys at Tellman Rose. Was this what her dad had been, all those years ago? A blushing boy from a farm who wouldn’t know sophistication if it hit him in the face?

Possibly she was being a snob. Well. She had to have _some_ standards, and presumably her dad was literally one in a million. You couldn’t look at these kids and tell which of them, if any, were going to devote themselves to better things, go to grad school, learn about opera and good suits, and become president of the college. Which, for her dad, still meant slumming it. 

Resigned, she thumped up the stairs to her dad’s quarters, fetched her swimsuit, and went off to the VAC again. She’d been there this morning, hoping to be surrounded by fit young men like the ones who ogled her at swim meets. Instead she’d found a throng of old men and one rather lumpy female lifeguard.

By the time she’d burnt off all her Westish-constrained energy and returned to her locker, it was six and her dad had left her several pleading text messages. “I was at the pool,” she said, walking back into his office to find him looking at her in his frequent mode of paternal distress. When he hugged her, which these days was usually a ploy to see if he could smell alcohol on her breath, she hoped he was impressed by the overpowering scent of chlorine. 

He took her to Maison Robert for dinner, which she couldn’t help comparing to all the nicer places they went to at home – although Cambridge was no longer “home” for either one of them – and spent half the meal introducing her to all the old, has-been professors who cooed over her like she was five years old.

“You look so much like your dad,” said one. Pella’s dad was tall and striking and extraordinary, but this was plainly false: his skin tone dark even in the winter, hers a delicate Irish white; her hair tending to red, his a dark brown before it was gray; his eyes gray too, hers blue-green. When she was little, people would probably have assumed she was a kidnap victim if she hadn’t always clung to his hand so tightly. 

Now they had the same tattoo, the same black ink whale rising, thrashing from the depths… but her dad didn’t wear tank tops, hardly ever went swimming. When she was little she remembered going to the baby pool with him, warm water probably filled with urine, so shallow even her feet hit the bottom. She’d always been enthralled by that whale of his in the water, the very idea of marking the skin permanently, changing a part of himself into another creature. Of course, plenty of the moms had been enthralled by her dad in Speedos too, and not just for what was on his muscular arm. 

“I don’t know if I’ll be able to come at Christmas,” she said as they walked back to quarters. “It’s a short break and I need to study.”

He looked at her. “It’s Christmas,” he said.

“I know, but it’s not like we’re religious.” He’d taken her to church a few times as a kid, told her bible stories, but he’d never really intended her to _believe_. “I’m not saying definitely, just… Don’t plan on me being here, okay?”

Over fifty, and he could still look like a little kid, devastated at the prospect of not getting exactly the right toy. “Okay,” he said, unlocking the side entrance of Scull Hall. “But I want to see you for your birthday. We’ll have fun, I promise. I’ll take some time off.”

“Why don’t you come to Boston? Or New York?”

He frowned. “You already know Boston and New York.”

“I’ve been here five minutes and I know Westish too.”

In the half-light of his study, he looked disappointed: his default state with her lately. “Pella, this is my home and you’re my only family. I’m your only family. We need to try a little harder to see each other more.”

“You’re the one who decided to take this job,” she said pointedly. “And you’ve got family – what about those uncles and cousins down in BFE? Go milk cows for a few weeks. I bet their Christmases are _awesome_.”

“Pella…” He had never, ever yelled at her, never spanked her even when she was little. When he was angry he became very clear, very forceful in his words without raising a hand. When he was upset he didn’t say anything at all. Now he just sank with resignation into one of the awkward leather chairs, and picked up a book to read. She slipped into her room.

She slipped out again a little after eleven, once he’d gone to sleep. Bartleby’s wasn’t all that by night either… But it was better than any of the alternatives.

 

IV.

The only parking space Schwartz could find was wedged between two bushes by the campus gates. By the time he trudged his way toward the main cluster of buildings, a horde of disoriented prospective students had disembarked from a bus with their bags and their Westish-branded pamphlets. When the bus left, they were all still standing there. Safety in numbers, Schwartz supposed, although Westish College hardly seemed like the most dangerous environment. Nearby, amid the trees that intermittently popped up from between concrete slabs, a squirrel was quietly contemplating them.

From the conversations he overheard on the way inside, this was a second- or third-choice school for many applicants. Westish wasn’t a bad school, academically speaking, but no one really wanted to come out here, not when they lived in Chicago and were used to modern conveniences like fast food and stores and culture. Schwartz found the greenery a nice change from the steam and sweat of the foundry, but maybe he’d find it oppressive in time too. Not that he had too many options, the way his final grades were likely to shake out.

The first stop on the pre-frosh itinerary was a campus tour. Westish wasn’t as big as some colleges, but it was a decent walk on a nice day and gave the student ambassador the chance to show off the library building, Melville statue, dining hall, and so on. The sports fields were glossed over, a hand waved, so Schwartz broke off from the group and went to look for himself.

They certainly weren’t much to admire – dilapidated century-old football stadium, forlorn baseball diamond, running track. Many high schools had better. But other colleges had worse and it wasn’t as if the Ivy League was calling.

Schwartz hustled to catch up with his group.

Packed into a lecture theater, they listened to the head of admissions give the talk all heads of admissions gave, which was about competitiveness and filling in forms correctly and finding out about financial aid and housing from the appropriate departments. She also introduced the college president, who turned out to be quite different from the balding, dumpy administrator Schwartz had anticipated. Affenlight was tall, broad-shouldered, fresh-faced in shirt sleeves rolled meticulously midway up his forearms – the kind of look politicians adopted when they wanted to seem “down to earth”. 

He spoke without notes, eyes scanning the assembled teens and parents as he told them about Ralph Waldo Emerson – a subject guaranteed to elicit either groans or blank looks, depending on whether the students had encountered Emerson before. But Affenlight had a way about him, an indefinable charisma that went beyond his looks, beyond his stage actor’s resonant voice.

Schwartz was rapt.

Next was food – a buffet lunch laid out in yet another hall. It looked good, but Schwartz was willing to take leftovers if he could get a moment with Affenlight. Unfortunately many others had left the lecture hall with the same idea. Schwartz watched Affenlight smile and shake the hands of a line of parents, mostly middle-aged mothers, until finally they dispersed and Affenlight went to get coffee.

“Excuse me, sir?” 

Affenlight’s smile was bright. “Guert Affenlight,” he said, holding out a hand.

Schwartz shook it. “Michael Schwartz.”

“Will we be seeing you in the fall, Michael?”

“I hope so, sir.” Schwartz didn’t see eye-to-eye with many people, physically or figuratively, but Affenlight just about made it on both counts. “That was a beautiful speech. Did it really happen?”

Affenlight sipped his coffee just long enough for Schwartz to infer that the answer was probably “no”. “If you like a story, I’ve found the best way to stop liking it is to ask whether or not it’s true... But the honest answer is we’re not sure. Emerson wrote about it in his journal, but some think he may not have meant it literally. Then again, others think his wife must have been a vampire. In any case, I think the message is true enough.”

“Can you imagine doing that?” The question was out of his mouth before he could take it back. He’d grown to think of teachers, and particularly college lecturers, as unwavering dispensers of wisdom, but he knew nothing about Affenlight or what personal tragedies he might have shouldered. He might even have lost a wife – Schwartz looked anxiously at Affenlight’s unadorned fingers around the coffee cup. 

“I can imagine it,” Affenlight said. “I can imagine contemplating it, needing to see for myself that someone I loved was really dead. But doing it? It’s not a casual morning’s stroll, and Emerson wasn’t quite built like you. Football?”

Schwartz dumbly looked down at himself. “Uh, yes sir. Baseball too, I hope.”

“Well, I’m sure we could use you. I don’t get out to the games much, but from what I gather the Harpooners’ trophy cabinet is a little bare. Not much has changed in the forty years since I was quarterback.” Affenlight smiled. “Sorry, I’m not doing my marketing very well, am I? At least the uniforms today are a little better. I had a hell of a time trying to pick up girls in red and yellow. Looked like a hotdog stand. What are you thinking of studying?”

“History?” Schwartz said, as if there might be a correct answer. His contributions to this conversation didn’t seem to be contributing much to the perception of himself as a sophisticated intellectual... not that the president would likely be reviewing admissions. “Why did you decide to come to Westish, sir?”

“Which time?” There were now a few other people apparently waiting to speak to Affenlight, but the president was still paying attention solely to Schwartz. For the moment. “Westish had a good biology program – still does, in fact – and was prepared to subsidize my fees in exchange for the football and some library work. As it turned out, the library work was more helpful than the biology.” Affenlight smiled at someone over Schwartz’s shoulder. “You’ll have to excuse me, Michael, but I look forward to seeing you in September.”

They shook hands again and Schwartz, inspired by this little conversation, took off to spend the remainder of the lunch break in the library. From this building at least, no one could claim Westish was a second-rate school. Admittedly Schwartz had never ventured into the libraries of Harvard or other Ivy League establishments, but if they were going to compete with this they’d have to be veritable subterranean cities. 

When he finally made his way out of the many basement levels, he found himself face to face with the library’s Melville Room: a hallowed chamber that seemed even more silent than the rest of the building. The room’s student guardian eyed him cautiously, as though he were likely to collide with any of the glass cabinets and shatter centuries-old manuscripts. Clockwise from the door, the room told the story of Melville’s visit to Westish in the late 19th century and replicated the text of his speech. It then, almost as spellbindingly, told of the discovery of that speech by a young football player in 1969.

“Huh,” Schwartz said. The student by the door shushed him.

In the campus bookstore, when he stumbled upon the actual books among the Melville memorabilia and the Harpooners-branded bags and sweatshirts, he found a recent biography of Emerson and then, after it occurred to him to check, _The Sperm-Squeezers_ by Guert Affenlight, which was a printing from 1998 but boasted impressive critical praise on the back cover nevertheless. His credit card didn’t thank him for buying them, but once he was back home with half a minute to spare between school and work, they served as a potent reminder of both a great speech and a way out of the city.

He mailed in his application.

 

V.

“Better a day late than a day early,” said the young clerk in the housing office, frowning at the board behind her desk, upon which hung at least a hundred different keys. “Tomorrow we’ll be ready with everything: keys, schedules, maps. And we pretty much expect some people to turn up the day after. Anything up to a week after, really. Flights get delayed, you know. People get the dates wrong. But a day _early_ …” She tapped her foot, distressed by this turn of events.

Owen wondered if it really mattered which key she gave him, if they were all empty. “I won the Maria Westish Award,” he said. “If that helps.”

“Oh!” she brightened, and tugged off a key from near the top of the board. There were two on the keyring. One she handed to him with a swipe card, checking off his name next on her clipboard. “Phumber 405.”

“Excuse me?”

“Phumber is the building. Then you want the fourth staircase, and up to the fourth floor.”

Owen silently contemplated what a “Phumber” might be. “I see. President Affenlight mentioned I’d have a roommate?”

“Yes, yes… Henry something.” She showed him the clipboard. 

“Skrimshander.” It sounded like Affenlight had actually just made up a fictional boy. Maybe O. Bulkington was across the hall. “Okay.”

“I guess he’ll be here tomorrow. With the rest of the entire student body.”

Owen took the key, trying to ignore the not-so-subtle hint that perhaps he should just go all the way back to San Jose and return at a more suitable time. Given his mom’s work hours, the flight schedules, and the personal items he had to transport to Westish, it had just seemed sensible to come a day early, particularly after President Affenlight had called last week and convinced him to take on a roommate. 

Even though saying no to the president, who was not only the author of possibly his favorite book but also a real charmer, had been practically impossible, he’d regretted it the moment he hung up. This Henry was supposed to be a baseball player, some amazing talent who had been accepted at the last minute… which probably meant some hulking brute of a guy who couldn’t get into college based on his grades. Some hulking brute who was going to figure out Owen was gay and have one of those homophobic freakouts. So, all things considered, it was much better for Owen to get to the room first and stake out his claim. At least that way, if the guy threw a fit, it would be Henry who had to move, not Owen.

He’d rented a car at the airport in Milwaukee, which was expensive and almost impossible as an 18-year-old new driver, but the guy at the desk had looked at his suitcases and boxes and taken pity on him. Now he found a janitor and begged a trolley so he could drag his stuff over to Phumber, clunking over the uneven paving stones and trying to maneuver between trees. Students in the nineteenth century had presumably eschewed bringing quite so many books, never mind artwork and a stereo. But his mom, worried about him going away and living on his own for the first time, had not only sprung for some of the amenities but the cost of transport too. Unfortunately she hadn’t supplied a burly porter to help out at the other end of his journey.

He swiped his keycard to get into Phumber and wedged open the door with a trashcan. The fourth staircase was easily enough to find. The major problem was that it was a staircase. Owen looked around, decided no one was about to make off with his belongings other than the squirrels, and set off for the 4th floor carrying his messenger bag and one of the lighter boxes. 

The room looked like a juvenile detention center. Bare white walls, two beds with bare mattresses and stacks of sheets, two bookshelves, two desks. Owen looked in the closet and checked the bathroom. It could be worse. He set down his things on one of the beds and went back downstairs.

Apparently the burly porter of his dreams had arrived. “This yours?” he said. “You should put it somewhere safer.”

“I’m trying, thanks.”

The guy, a little taller than Owen but about three times as wide, scratched at his receding hairline. “Need a hand?”

His name was Mike Schwartz, Owen discovered as they were lugging everything upstairs. He was a sophomore from Chicago, and had apparently been around for weeks already, undergoing punishing training for the upcoming football season. “You play?” Mike asked.

Owen couldn’t figure out if this was a dumb question or a refreshingly unbiased one. “No, sorry. Just baseball.”

“Really?” Mike unstacked two book boxes, lining them up on what would be Henry’s desk, if Henry lasted five minutes. “What position?”

“Right field.”

Usually a subject for derision – of _course_ the skinny gay kid was stuck in right field – this only made Mike adopt a contemplative expression. “Yeah? Well we’re running pretty short in good right fielders. Good anything, pretty much. Sooty’s not bad though. You’ll come to tryouts in a couple of months?”

“Naturally.” Owen opened up one of his suitcases. “Would you foresee any of your colleagues having a problem with a gay man on the team?”

Mike shrugged his massive shoulders. “Depends. Can the gay man play?”

“Sure,” Owen said. “I can play.”

“Then we won’t have a problem…” Mike looked out of the slightly grubby windows. “I’m going to miss being on campus this year. Dining hall, library right here. I can see why Affy sticks around.”

“President Affenlight?”

“Yeah, he lives right here in Scull.” Mike indicated the building – just like Phumber, but with nicer flowerbeds. “You’ll probably bump into him soon enough. Have you read _The Sperm-Squeezers_?”

“Of course!” It was in one of these boxes, but Owen suspected getting the man himself to sign it would be unbelievably childish. Then again, Affenlight probably already thought he was an idiot after whatever he’d said on the phone last week. He could dazzle the man all he wanted with well-thought-out, immaculately polished papers, and then undo it all in a minute of excited babbling.

Once he’d unpacked and Mike had excused himself to go to yet another football practice, Owen walked into town to do a little shopping: groceries, cleaning supplies, nails with which to hang his paintings, and a rug. The room really needed a little color. When he came back, a laptop had appeared on his desk: not the latest model, but certainly more than serviceable when it came to writing papers and checking e-mail. It also came with Tetris, he discovered, pausing in his evening decoration of his new home.

If his new roommate _did_ turn out to be a homophobic oaf, would he have to give the computer back? Never mind that, what about the subsidy they were paying him, which had been earmarked not only for his new rug, but for marijuana supplies just as soon as anyone who knew anything arrived on campus. 

By the time he pulled his seafoam-green comforter over him and settled down to spend his first night at Westish College, the room was clean and bright and undeniably _his_. Yes he’d need to acquire a few more things as time went on – a minifridge, maybe some plants for the windowsill, and extra towels in case he had guests – but for now he had books and a bed, and what did anyone really need other than that?

Tomorrow he’d tackle the bathroom – the bathtub was remarkably spider-free, but the grout was disgusting. Then he’d take the car back to the rental office, check out the library, have his first meal in the dining hall, and perhaps run into President Affenlight on the sidewalks of the Small Quad downstairs. Maybe he’d even keep his cool this time.

Finally, before dropping off to sleep, he vaguely wondered when Henry Skrimshander might show up. 

He hoped he’d be nice.


End file.
